Followers

Friday, August 05, 2016

Kenya's Greatest Gamble Yet

Last Sunday, the Daily
Nation bravely shone a spotlight on the gambling craze that is sweeping the
nation. Sports betting has taken the country by storm. Since 2013 when the
first online sports betting company, SportPesa, was registered, the Betting
Control and Licensing Board has awarded similar licenses to nearly 30 other
bookmakers. The industry today has a turnover of Ksh 2.1 billion which is
expected to nearly triple over the next three years.

Yet, as with all
gambling, this is not just a good news story about company profits. The fact is
those profits are made on the back of broken dreams and crippled lives. While
the touted image is the beaming face of a winner holding his big
cheque, rarely seen are the millions of losers and the toll gambling
addiction is taking on families across the country.

In February, the
director of communications at SportPesa, Kester Shimonyo, told the Nation that
people “should bet for fun but it should not be taken as a fulltime economic
activity”. However, taking a chance on the wheel of fortune has been a national
activity for a long time.

Government has been turned into a looting machine
which has destroyed the meritocratic basis of our political economy. Get-rich-quick schemes of the politically connected have undermined the utility of education, skills and
character as guarantors of success has been severely undermined.

Today, in public affairs, what matters is
the lottery of who you know, rather than the certainty of what. In today’s
Kenya, where your last name can, in the words of Kalonzo Muyoka, “betray you”, and
where values can be a liability, what does it matter the qualifications you
hold, or knowledge or integrity you have?

The declaration
earlier this week by Commissioners of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries
Commission that they were willing to resign office was also the culmination of
yet another a high stakes gamble of the sort that all too frequently seem to be
the preferred way to run public affairs. It has been obvious to anyone who cared
to look that public confidence in both the Commission and its Commissioners,
the bedrock upon which any credible and peaceful election would rest, had long
since eroded away. Opinion surveys have shown that citizens across political
and ethnic divides had an increasingly dim view of the IEBC with nearly half of
respondents in one poll saying the body could not be trusted to handle the
2017 election.

Yet despite this and through
weekly public protests called by the opposition beginning April in which
several Kenyans died or were brutalized at the hands of the police, and in
which many businesses were looted, the Commissioners sat put and refused to
budge. Talk of their resigning was peremptorily brushed aside even when the inevitability
of their removal became plain. It was clear, like the many other Kenyans
staking their lives and fortunes on the turn of a soccer match, the IEBC
commissioners were betting on the outcome of the political match between the
ruling Jubilee and opposition CORD coalitions.

Like their fellow
gamblers, they do not see their future as dependent on their personal
performance (already soiled by the failures during the 2013 election), or on
their integrity, but on the games played by politicians.

Now following their
resignation, Kenya will now embark on her greatest gamble yet. For 3 years, we
have ignored the need to comprehensively reform our electoral system. Everything is broken: from the voter register to the petitions system, especially as regards challenges to the Presidential election. We have done little to mitigate the weaknesses exposed by past elections, to acquire the requisite technology and making necessary
changes to the law. Party nominations remain fraught with cheating and violence and attempts to regulate campaign finance have hit a brick wall.

Now, with a year to go to the 2017 polls, we
find ourselves forced to make fundamental changes. It is doubtful that there
will be enough time for anything other than “minimum” reforms followed by a
roll of the dice and many prayers for peace.

This nation of inveterate gamblers, which has since independence placed similar wagers with disastrous consequences, will once
again stake its future, not on its skill and knowledge, but on the games played by its politicians.

And just as with the sports betting, on election day the images of the election will be the beaming politicians and voters' purple-stained fingers, not the rage and disappointment resulting from an election with little public faith.

In many ways, Kenya has been playing with matches and riding her luck. Yet we are storing up terrible trouble for the day our luck runs out.